2019 has, overall, been a fantastic year for me. I bought my first car, an adorable little Mini Cooper, adopted my first pet, a 17 pound chonker of a cat named Fuzz, and got to visit my friends and family back in the UK. But, best of all, after years of scrimping and saving, my husband and I finally had enough money to put a down payment on a house. That’s right, folks, I’m now one of those boring adults with a house and a cat and a car! Ha, ha, ha! I’m sure you’re now thinking: OK, that’s all well and good, but what does that have to do with anime? Well, aside from meaning that I’m now far too busy working my ass off to pay bills to have the time to watch any, it does mean that I now have the space to house my ever-growing collection of anime merchandise…
From 2012, when I first moved out of my childhood home to attend university, until 2017 I conducted my life out of small, single bedrooms. My chronic lack of finances dictated that I share my living quarters with other people. And while that was often a lot of fun, and I have many fond memories of that time, it wasn’t conducive to allowing my collection of anime merchandise to grow. It wouldn’t have been fair of me to let my books, Blu Rays, and other, more questionable memorabilia spill into the shared living room. Not to mention that I wouldn’t have wanted to field off questions about some of the weirder titles in my collection. Like, who wants to explain Berserk to a normie? Thus, my collection had to be contained to a single, sad looking bookshelf in my room.
From 2017 until earlier this year I lived with my husband and his parents, my in-laws. And while their big American home was practically palatial compared to what I was used to in the UK, I still faced the same issue of not wanting to overstep my boundaries and fill somebody else’s home with my junk. When my collection of anime merchandise outgrew its single bookshelf (which didn’t take long even after having reduced it significantly when I moved country), I had to get creative. I crammed Blu Rays into my closet (who needs clothes?) and manga into old shoe-boxes, all while my Nendoroids lurked sinisterly underneath my bed.
But, now that my husband and I have our own home, gone are the days of squirrelling away my anime merchandise like it’s a dirty little secret. I now have a whole room just for my collection! Sometimes I wander into said room just to sit and look at it all. Seeing it arranged so neatly, no stacks piled one on top of the other, no bookshelves creaking disturbingly under the weight of too many books, gives me great joy! And what’s more is that I now have enough space for my collection to grow. Just look at all that space! This is the first time since becoming a die-hard anime fan that that’s now a possibility and it feels like such a luxury…
Watashi Wa Bucho!! 